Academia.edu is a for-profit open repository of academic articles free to read by visitors. Uploading and downloading is restricted to registered users. Additional features are accessible only as a paid subscription. Since 2016 various social networking utilities have been added. The site was registered in the .edu top-level domain in 1999 when that domain was not limited to educational institutions. It is operated as for-profit company under the name Academia Inc. Since the site's launch in 2008, the number of users has grown exponentially, reaching about 10 million daily visits in early 2022. At that time the numbers of registered users is 180 million and 40 million papers are available on the site. History Academia.edu was founded by Richard Price. On its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company uses the legal name Academia Inc. Months after its acquisition of Academia.edu competitor Mendeley, Elsevier sent thousands of takedown notices to Academia.edu, a practice that has ceased since then, following widespread complaint by academics, according to Academia.edu founder and chief executive Richard Price. In 2022 the company announced plans to launch ten “open access” journals "to swiftly review and publish their work, in a fresh disruption to the sector". Competitors Critics mention several alternatives for free access publications for people who want to make their work freely available. Many universities and educational consortia have their own institutional repositories, including the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Zenodo (funded by The OpenAIRE Consortium) and Humanities Commons both work to keep humanities scholarship online without monetizing it. Academia.edu's competitors include ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Mendeley. In 2016 Academia.edu reportedly had more registered users than ResearchGate (about 34 million versus 11 million) and higher web traffic, but ResearchGate had substantially more active usage by researchers. In 2020, the traffic ranks had reversed, with ResearchGate ranked in the top 150–200 websites globally according to Alexa Internet, whereas Academia.edu was positioned in the 200–300 range. Unpaywall, which collects data about open access versions of academic publications and provides easy access to them, is considered a competitor to Academia.edu for the users who prefer more legally sound green open access hosts. Criticism Academia.edu is not a university or institution for higher learning and so under current standards it would not qualify for the ".edu" top-level domain. However, since the domain name "Academia.edu" was registered in 1999, before the regulations required .edu domain names to be held solely